IX.] EVOLUTION AND ETHICS. 227 



Habit, education, and intellectual gifts facilitate the cor- 

 rect application of both. 



Again, if our moral insight is intensified or blunted by 

 our habitual wishes or, indirectly, by our physical con- 

 dition, the same may be said of our perception of the true 

 relations of physical facts one to another. An eager wish 

 for marriage has led many a man to exaggerate the powers 

 of a limited income, and a fit of dyspepsia has given an 

 unreasonably gloomy aspect to more than one balance- 

 sheet. 



Considering that moral intuitions have to do with in- 

 sensible matters, they cannot be expected to be more clear 

 than the perception of physical facts. And if the latter 

 perceptions may be influenced by volition, desire, or health, 

 our moral views may also be expected to be so influenced, 

 and this in a higher degree because they so often run 

 counter to our desires. A bottle or two of wine may 

 make a sensible object appear double ; what wonder, then, 

 if our moral perceptions are sometimes warped and dis- 

 torted by such powerful agencies as an evil education or 

 an habitual absence of self-restraint ? In neither case does 

 occasional distortion invalidate the accuracy of normal and 

 habitual perception. 



The distinctness here and now of the ideas of " right " 

 and " useful " is however, as before said, fully conceded by 

 Mr. Herbert Spencer, although he contends that these con- 

 ceptions are one in root and origin. 



His utilitarian Genesis of Morals, however, has been 

 recently combated by Mr. Richard Holt Hutton in a paper 

 which appeared in Macmillans Magazine}- 



This writer objects an argumentum ad hominem, applying 

 i See No. 117, July 1869, p. 272. 

 Q 2 



